There's no question that the earth is going through some sort of warming trend. However, it's far from conclusive that that warming is man-made. In fact, there seems to be evidence that global warming is occurring on other planets in the solar system, too, suggesting that the cause is the Sun getting warmer:
Well, to be fair, Bioshock was the only game that did that. As I mentioned, I just built a new system, so I got a smokin'-hot graphics card, and of course, the first thing you do with a new graphics card is you load up all of your old games and crank all of the settings to max. I didn't have problems with anything else. Bioshock being the newest and most cutting-edge of the lot, it didn't surprise me that the driver crashed three or four times in 30 hours.
If I had had to reboot each time, then yeah, that would have been the virtual equivalent of a kick in the nuts. But a 10 second pause... ehhh, not so much.
I use 32 bit Vista Ultimate everyday on my production machine. I can't say that I really have any complaints about it. Nor does it seem to be the "total disaster" that the article implies that it is. On the contrary, I just built my production machine, and all of the drivers for my motherboard were already installed in Vista. That was a nice surprise.
I just played through Bioshock (which isn't coming to a Mac near you, BTW). A few times through the 30 or so hours I spent playing the game, the screen went black for 10 seconds, and then came back up. I didn't know what had happened the first time it did that until I quit the game, and there was a dialog box saying something about the video driver crashing, but apparently Vista reloaded the driver, with just a momentary hiccup. On a Mac or an XP box, a video driver crash generally means hitting the Reset button.
Aero has some nice eye candy, but I ended up turning it off because my Illustrator CS2 pallets were incompatible with it. QuickBooks 2006 won't run on Vista, but I already have my old XP system installed on a Virtual PC drive for other work that I do, so I'll probably install QB there.
My brother is using the 64 bit version of Vista for his video production work (since 32 bit Vista is capped at 3 GB of RAM), so I know that there's a lot more headaches with 64 bit Vista. But, I was a Mac user when Apple switched from OS 9 to OS X, and how many headaches there were with that. I've been in IT long enough to know that major OS upgrades always come with a price, but progress is generally worth it.
Yeah, the DRM sucks, but what can you do?
Oh, and if you want to turn off the "Allow or Deny" dialogs (which are EXTREMELY annoying), just go to the User Accounts Control Panel and turn off User Account Control.
Everyone's talking about the Apple statement, but the reporter seems to have said that; he's not quoting an industry exec.
Not that it matters. That's only one tiny sentence in a 10 page article. What the article is REALLY about (aside from needing new content) is how it's tough to market artists in today's environment. According to the article, the music industry was finely tuned to the old way of promoting artists, which reigned for 50 years -- radio, Tower Records, MTV, Rolling Stone. but focus groups are showing that kids don't listen to radio anymore, they mostly steal rather than purchase music, and MTV has long since gotten out of the 24-hour music format. The industry is in distribution free fall, and everyone seems to be saying that a low-cost monthly subscription model is the answer.
60 Minutes did a report on a drug (Propranolol) that has a similar effect, and is already available on the market (to treat a different symptom). What was interesting about the report was the relationship between adrenaline and the formation of memories; i.e., the bigger the adrenaline surge, the more powerful the memory that is created.
Here's the whole segment, chopped up into bite-sized morsels:
Well, if you getting to act out ripping off a guy's testicles with a pair of pliers in a bloody display and sawing his groin in half doesn't qualify for the Adult's Only rating, I'm not sure that anything does. Is there anything that you would qualify as requiring an Adults Only rating, or do you disagree with the rating altogether?
Social mores may seem bedrock-solid, but they are gradually shifting with society's changes in attitudes, particularly as we are exposed to and become desensitized to certain subjects. I've never seen Saw, simply because it's not my cup of tea, but if it's as graphic as all of that, then I can't imagine any theater showing it if it had been released in the 70's or 80's. But then we had movies come along like Natural Born Killers and American Psycho that pushed the door open.
However, certain companies are making a lot of money by breaking taboos. Rockstar Games is one of those companies. They are on the bleeding edge of societal change, whether you think that that's a good or bad thing. It's also means that companies like Rockstar, being the trailblazers, are going to catch the most fire for what they're producing. In a few years' time, however, there will be lots of companies producing Manhunt 2 clones, but there won't be much outcry because Rockstar already took all of the heat.
Consider for one moment that in Manhunt 2 you can, Wii remote and nunchuk in hands, use a pair of pliers to clamp onto an enemy's testicles and literally tear them from his body in a bloody display; and if that weren't enough, you'll take one of the poor victim's vertebrae along with his manhood. Or, if you'd prefer, you can use a saw blade and cut upward into a foe's groin and buttocks, motioning forward and backward with the Wii remote as you go. But believe it or not, there is much more to Manhunt 2 than mutilation and mayhem. This is a game that begins with the subject of psychosis.
Yes, I'm certain the only reason that this game is getting an Adults Only rating is because of "past sins"...::rolls eyes::
Most first-person shooters don't stand up to time very well. Not because of the graphics, mind you, but because of the hackers. Usually after a few months on the market, the developer pretty much abandons the game and stops issuing patches to stop the latest cheats. Then the game gets overrun by kids playing with aimbots and wall hacks. I still play Halo 1, and a good 75% of the players in ANY game are using the aimbot.
I used to be a hardcore Mac user, but I got tired of the Mac gaming scene (always hoping and waiting and signing petitions for games to get ported). When that rare game does get ported to the Mac, it's usually six months or a year behind the PC version. Which means that if you play online against PC users, the hackers are already taking over, even if you bought the game on the day of release.
Mac gaming sucks, and I say that as a Mac user for over 20 years.
I tend to think that what Apple needs to do is to acquire an A-List, proven game developer, and start cranking out titles in-house. Then they would start getting a lot of internal feedback on how to modify their internal processes and their business model to accomodate the games market. Granted, there's a 75% chance that such a move would kill off said game company, but Apple hasn't known how to court game developers since the Apple ][ days and they need to do something to jumpstart the process.
The reason is that the terrorists had the element of surprise; nobody knew what they were going to do. Before 9/11, terrorists commandeered commercial aircraft, landed them somewhere, made outrageous demands while they had a standoff with police, and the hostages had a 50/50 chance of walking away alive.
The 9/11 hijackers were pretending that this was a typical hijack scenario when they took over the planes. If the cockpit doors had had locks on them, the terrorists would have started killing the passengers, one at a time, until the crew unlocked the door. The pilot would have unlocked the door, thinking that the was saving lives by doing so.
In the post-9/11 world, we now know that the aircraft has much more value as a weapon than as a device for taking hostages. But we ONLY know this because of 9/11.
Several years ago, I saw a court reporter using a speech recognition system with his laptop. The microphone actually looked like some sort of breathing apparatus, as it fit snugly over his mouth and nose with the wires in a tube running down to the laptop.
Actually, the Digg team are pretty well on top of User/Submitter. When the story about it broke on Digg, I created a new Digg account and then signed up for U/S just to check it out. I dugg all of the stories I was told to digg (four in all, I think). Digg closed out my account within a few hours. I repeated the process several more times over about a week, and each time, Digg caught me and shut me down. I even tried creating accounts that posted messages that were well moderated, submitted stories, and dugg lots of other stories (basically, I acted like a valued user instead of a U/S whore), and I would even take hours between digging the U/S stories. Digg still found me and shut me down.
The answer is pretty simple. U/S is supposed to give you a lot of bogus links to click in addition to the paid links, just to throw Digg off their trail. But the bogus stories aren't randomly chosen for each person. As I clicked on each story I was told to digg, I would check the other accounts of people who had dugg it. And, sure enough, most everyone else was digging the exact same stories I was. Therefore, it was pretty simple for Digg to sign up with U/S, get the list of stories, search their own database for people who had dugg ALL of those stories, and close them out with absolute certainty.
So, what U/S needs to do is to 1) randomly choose bogus stories for each person and 2) don't give EVERYONE the link to the real story to digg. Digg would still find out which stories hit the front page because of U/S, but it would take Digg days or weeks instead of hours to track down the abusers and shut down the accounts.
Right now, U/S is too much of a hassle because you have to create a new Digg account every few hours.
since I don't know this kid from Adam. And neither do any of you.
But the ABC story never explained WHY the police showed up on his doorstep with a search warrant. Judges generally have to have a good reason to give those things out. What evidence did they have that prompted the investigation?
Keep in mind that these shows on ABC and CBS, they look for stories where they can be the silver knight riding in on the white horse to save the day. They're selling a program, not justice. So, that may mean that a few facts get swept under the rug in order to tell their story they way they want it to be told, to completely suck the viewer in.
I'm not saying that the kid is guilty, here. But the ABC story doesn't convince me that he's innocent, either.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no question that the earth is going through some sort of warming trend. However, it's far from conclusive that that warming is man-made. In fact, there seems to be evidence that global warming is occurring on other planets in the solar system, too, suggesting that the cause is the Sun getting warmer:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/global-warming-on-jupiter.html
So, why are they giving Gore the Nobel Prize for giving out misinformation about a natural event that we can't do anything about?
It ships with Duke Nukem Forever preinstalled.
Well, to be fair, Bioshock was the only game that did that. As I mentioned, I just built a new system, so I got a smokin'-hot graphics card, and of course, the first thing you do with a new graphics card is you load up all of your old games and crank all of the settings to max. I didn't have problems with anything else. Bioshock being the newest and most cutting-edge of the lot, it didn't surprise me that the driver crashed three or four times in 30 hours.
If I had had to reboot each time, then yeah, that would have been the virtual equivalent of a kick in the nuts. But a 10 second pause... ehhh, not so much.
I use 32 bit Vista Ultimate everyday on my production machine. I can't say that I really have any complaints about it. Nor does it seem to be the "total disaster" that the article implies that it is. On the contrary, I just built my production machine, and all of the drivers for my motherboard were already installed in Vista. That was a nice surprise.
I just played through Bioshock (which isn't coming to a Mac near you, BTW). A few times through the 30 or so hours I spent playing the game, the screen went black for 10 seconds, and then came back up. I didn't know what had happened the first time it did that until I quit the game, and there was a dialog box saying something about the video driver crashing, but apparently Vista reloaded the driver, with just a momentary hiccup. On a Mac or an XP box, a video driver crash generally means hitting the Reset button.
Aero has some nice eye candy, but I ended up turning it off because my Illustrator CS2 pallets were incompatible with it. QuickBooks 2006 won't run on Vista, but I already have my old XP system installed on a Virtual PC drive for other work that I do, so I'll probably install QB there.
My brother is using the 64 bit version of Vista for his video production work (since 32 bit Vista is capped at 3 GB of RAM), so I know that there's a lot more headaches with 64 bit Vista. But, I was a Mac user when Apple switched from OS 9 to OS X, and how many headaches there were with that. I've been in IT long enough to know that major OS upgrades always come with a price, but progress is generally worth it.
Yeah, the DRM sucks, but what can you do?
Oh, and if you want to turn off the "Allow or Deny" dialogs (which are EXTREMELY annoying), just go to the User Accounts Control Panel and turn off User Account Control.
Everyone's talking about the Apple statement, but the reporter seems to have said that; he's not quoting an industry exec.
Not that it matters. That's only one tiny sentence in a 10 page article. What the article is REALLY about (aside from needing new content) is how it's tough to market artists in today's environment. According to the article, the music industry was finely tuned to the old way of promoting artists, which reigned for 50 years -- radio, Tower Records, MTV, Rolling Stone. but focus groups are showing that kids don't listen to radio anymore, they mostly steal rather than purchase music, and MTV has long since gotten out of the 24-hour music format. The industry is in distribution free fall, and everyone seems to be saying that a low-cost monthly subscription model is the answer.
It sounds like Comcast has received a big, fat check from Microsoft.
60 Minutes did a report on a drug (Propranolol) that has a similar effect, and is already available on the market (to treat a different symptom). What was interesting about the report was the relationship between adrenaline and the formation of memories; i.e., the bigger the adrenaline surge, the more powerful the memory that is created.
Here's the whole segment, chopped up into bite-sized morsels:
The Memory Pill
Well, if you getting to act out ripping off a guy's testicles with a pair of pliers in a bloody display and sawing his groin in half doesn't qualify for the Adult's Only rating, I'm not sure that anything does. Is there anything that you would qualify as requiring an Adults Only rating, or do you disagree with the rating altogether?
Social mores may seem bedrock-solid, but they are gradually shifting with society's changes in attitudes, particularly as we are exposed to and become desensitized to certain subjects. I've never seen Saw, simply because it's not my cup of tea, but if it's as graphic as all of that, then I can't imagine any theater showing it if it had been released in the 70's or 80's. But then we had movies come along like Natural Born Killers and American Psycho that pushed the door open.
However, certain companies are making a lot of money by breaking taboos. Rockstar Games is one of those companies. They are on the bleeding edge of societal change, whether you think that that's a good or bad thing. It's also means that companies like Rockstar, being the trailblazers, are going to catch the most fire for what they're producing. In a few years' time, however, there will be lots of companies producing Manhunt 2 clones, but there won't be much outcry because Rockstar already took all of the heat.
Yes, I'm certain the only reason that this game is getting an Adults Only rating is because of "past sins"...
It's a contest! Some lucky person actually gets to win that old, rusted-out bucket!
From the award letter:
CONGRATULATIONS! You have won this 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, stored in a time capsule 50 years ago! (See picture)
Please make arrangements to have the vehicle moved off of city property as soon as possible or we will have to start fining you $50/day.
Most first-person shooters don't stand up to time very well. Not because of the graphics, mind you, but because of the hackers. Usually after a few months on the market, the developer pretty much abandons the game and stops issuing patches to stop the latest cheats. Then the game gets overrun by kids playing with aimbots and wall hacks. I still play Halo 1, and a good 75% of the players in ANY game are using the aimbot.
I used to be a hardcore Mac user, but I got tired of the Mac gaming scene (always hoping and waiting and signing petitions for games to get ported). When that rare game does get ported to the Mac, it's usually six months or a year behind the PC version. Which means that if you play online against PC users, the hackers are already taking over, even if you bought the game on the day of release.
Mac gaming sucks, and I say that as a Mac user for over 20 years.
I tend to think that what Apple needs to do is to acquire an A-List, proven game developer, and start cranking out titles in-house. Then they would start getting a lot of internal feedback on how to modify their internal processes and their business model to accomodate the games market. Granted, there's a 75% chance that such a move would kill off said game company, but Apple hasn't known how to court game developers since the Apple ][ days and they need to do something to jumpstart the process.
I hear the Monkey Boy dance is big in China...
have prevented 9/11.
The reason is that the terrorists had the element of surprise; nobody knew what they were going to do. Before 9/11, terrorists commandeered commercial aircraft, landed them somewhere, made outrageous demands while they had a standoff with police, and the hostages had a 50/50 chance of walking away alive.
The 9/11 hijackers were pretending that this was a typical hijack scenario when they took over the planes. If the cockpit doors had had locks on them, the terrorists would have started killing the passengers, one at a time, until the crew unlocked the door. The pilot would have unlocked the door, thinking that the was saving lives by doing so.
In the post-9/11 world, we now know that the aircraft has much more value as a weapon than as a device for taking hostages. But we ONLY know this because of 9/11.
Ok, how many other sites out there have 180 million users?
Besides, it seems to me that MySpace's development team is grossly understaffed. Every time they add a new feature, it's always half-baked.
With 180 million users, I don't think fair to compare MySpace's performance with any other CF web site out there.
Several years ago, I saw a court reporter using a speech recognition system with his laptop. The microphone actually looked like some sort of breathing apparatus, as it fit snugly over his mouth and nose with the wires in a tube running down to the laptop.
Actually, the Digg team are pretty well on top of User/Submitter. When the story about it broke on Digg, I created a new Digg account and then signed up for U/S just to check it out. I dugg all of the stories I was told to digg (four in all, I think). Digg closed out my account within a few hours. I repeated the process several more times over about a week, and each time, Digg caught me and shut me down. I even tried creating accounts that posted messages that were well moderated, submitted stories, and dugg lots of other stories (basically, I acted like a valued user instead of a U/S whore), and I would even take hours between digging the U/S stories. Digg still found me and shut me down.
The answer is pretty simple. U/S is supposed to give you a lot of bogus links to click in addition to the paid links, just to throw Digg off their trail. But the bogus stories aren't randomly chosen for each person. As I clicked on each story I was told to digg, I would check the other accounts of people who had dugg it. And, sure enough, most everyone else was digging the exact same stories I was. Therefore, it was pretty simple for Digg to sign up with U/S, get the list of stories, search their own database for people who had dugg ALL of those stories, and close them out with absolute certainty.
So, what U/S needs to do is to 1) randomly choose bogus stories for each person and 2) don't give EVERYONE the link to the real story to digg. Digg would still find out which stories hit the front page because of U/S, but it would take Digg days or weeks instead of hours to track down the abusers and shut down the accounts.
Right now, U/S is too much of a hassle because you have to create a new Digg account every few hours.
Nutman, you are, indeed, appropriately named.
Nowhere in the article does it state that the US Government has any involvement with this company.
since I don't know this kid from Adam. And neither do any of you.
But the ABC story never explained WHY the police showed up on his doorstep with a search warrant. Judges generally have to have a good reason to give those things out. What evidence did they have that prompted the investigation?
Keep in mind that these shows on ABC and CBS, they look for stories where they can be the silver knight riding in on the white horse to save the day. They're selling a program, not justice. So, that may mean that a few facts get swept under the rug in order to tell their story they way they want it to be told, to completely suck the viewer in.
I'm not saying that the kid is guilty, here. But the ABC story doesn't convince me that he's innocent, either.
Completely slammed, however... someone got a bittorent link?
Does anyone have this yet?
Somebody modded you down, but that really is a far more useful measurement.
Still, 1% of 5 billion is still a significant number.
500,000,000 pages, many of which are entry pages to sites that Google can't index, so the number skews even higher.
Microsoft is proof that you don't have to be the best to win, you just have to be ubiquitous.
I also found that if you fill both the monitor and the computer case with cement, that makes it near-impossible to steal as well.
Oh, and you'll want to bolt down the keyboard to the desk, and staple the cable for it down every quarter-inch using the long carpet staples.
In that case, please post a "story" for my business, too... 10% off my PHP development services when you mention this ad!